"I know," Hal said tonelessly. "It was his son, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Curious that the old man should be so concerned over that little unpleasantness. So his son did get a little excited and kill a Proprietor and was executed himself. No reason for his father to carry on so about it, is there? I tried to get him to take the Treatment then, but—well, after all, you can hardly expect an uncivilized Outlander to appreciate the advantages, can you?"
"No." Hal did not refer to the fact that the new element recently put into the standard CC Treatment was causing him to postpone taking it himself, but his father seemed to sense his thought.
"You won't mind it, son. Really you won't. The Treatment will take care of the whole thing. It's perfectly obvious that you are suffering from the effects of the delay right at this moment."
"Oh Chaos," Hal swore softly. "Why did they have to go and put that element in anyway?"
"Now Hal, you know better than that," his father chided him gently. "It was either include a marital inclination or else go in for a complete program of artificial insemination. The women have a vote too, you know, and they wouldn't hear of it. They don't object to carrying a child for a few months—that's always been in their conditioning for some reason or another. But they insisted that if they had to be mothers, the men would have to be fathers. And they insisted on a standard, civilized marriage contract to cover the situation."
"I know, I know. I've heard all the arguments. Racial suicide and all. Nonsense. We can always import Outlanders and force them to take the Treatment. Outlanders," he pointed out with suitable, mild, cultured disgust, "breed like animals."
"No son, that wouldn't do the job. We have to keep the blood line. Outlanders don't have it, you know. If they did, they would have permitted themselves to be civilized long ago."
Hal's fingers drummed nervously on the desk top, and his father again raised an eyebrow in mild concern. He shook his head thoughtfully.
Guiltily, Hal stopped his fingers from their satisfying tattoo. He bunched them into a fist instead, and then gazed at it with mild unbelief.